WordPress

The comment area changed a lot in WordPress 2.7. A good reason to check your comments.php and make some changes to it. Especially I like to seperate the comments from Ping- and Trackbacks. Matt shows in an excellent tutorial how to do it: Separating Pings from Comments.

But I didn't like one thing in this tutorial. To show the total count of your comments without Pings/Trackbacks, he writes following function in functions.php:Continue reading …

Avatars are popular as identification and with the service Gravatar it is largely used in the comment area of different applications.
WordPress allows the user some basic settings. For example loading a default or generated Avatar, if the commentator doesn't have one.
Various themes have a standard Avatar to match the design. But even here there is a nice solution via a hook, which enables to add an avatar in the list of your backend to make a selection quite simple. In the following I would like to show with a short and simple code snippet how to add 2 new avatars to the array of WordPress.

You have to add this little function to functions.php of your theme and it will add 2 Avatar from your folder images of your theme directory. I suggest, that the Avatars have a size of 60 pixel.

Since WordPress version 2.5, it is easier to include the Gravatar of a comment author in the comments. WordPress offers a feature that is easy to use and it brings some parameters with. In order to use and how to include a Gravatar, I would refer to the article „Gravatar Use Easy“.

But with this feature you can do more. Magazine-style for blogs are currently in high demand and many blogs have a a couple of authors. Many times the blogs link and present the author of the respective contribution. WP offers a whole range of template tags to this functionality, check out Codex.

Since version 2.5 of WordPress, Gravatar service is included in the core files. On one hand, you can use it to make the comment overview more nicely. But you can also integrate this function in your template and you don't have to use a Plugin.Continue reading …

So far, the users with the current version are very happy, even if WordPress abandons a certain circle of users. Since version 2.7 users with a small web package and not enough RAM are getting in trouble. The new functionality and comfort in the new backend is fairly highly loaded, so that users with RAM smaller than 32 MB will either have some problems or have to upgrade their webspace.

Also the new year will bring many new features to WordPress. Here is a quick peek at the up and coming next steps in WordPress development. Continue reading …